People who receive primary care from free clinics are less likely to use the emergency department for minor issues, according to a team of medical researchers including Wenke Hwang, associate professor of public health sciences at Penn State College of Medicine, and his colleagues.

Extending Medicaid coverage to currently uninsured adults is likely to increase the cost of the program, according to health policy researchers, because those patients are prone to have more expensive health problems than nondisabled adults currently enrolled in Medicaid. The Affordable Care Act gives individual states the option to expand their Medicaid programs to cover many who are uninsured. A study by Penn State and Wake Forest University researchers is among the first to quantify the potential financial impact of this option. "We sought to compare the health needs and health-services utilization of the uninsured who are served by safety-net providers with those of nondisabled adult Medicaid recipients living in the same county, in order to help project the potential financial impact of enrolling uninsured people in Medicaid," the researchers stated in a recent issue of the North Carolina Medical Journal.